After a short stay in Cleveland and a quick trip to Warsaw to visit his mother, Hay arrived at Lake Sunapee with Clara and the children at the beginning of August. The house at the Fells was not quite finished but far enough along for them to move in. Hay called the place a “pine shanty,” but it was considerably more substantial than that. Its bowed gambrel roof was typical of genteel summerhouses of the day. Sunny upstairs bedrooms and a sixty-foot-long piazza afforded panoramic views of the lake and the magnificent mountains beyond. In addition to a servant wing, icehouse, and stable, Hay also installed a dock; the best way to and from Newbury was by hired steam launch. The Fells would never again be a working farm, although sheep continued to graze in the boulder-strewn pastures.
Half in earnest, Hay wrote Lizzie Cameron during the summer to suggest that she buy one of the adjacent properties and “retire from the world you adore and seek real solitude.” Lizzie, meanwhile, remained in Paris, awaiting the arrival of Henry Adams, who, when last heard from, was in Australia. “John Hay writes to me now & then,” she informed Adams. “He pretends that he likes me since our London season together, but I know better. Nanny is the first.” Yet by now even Lizzie had to recognize that this appraisal was out of date.
Hay was slow to recover from whatever had sapped his health in Europe. He complained that he was constantly dizzy and that his heart was “miserably weak.” But, as he had hoped, the air at the Fells and the simpler rhythm of daily life had a restorative effect. And it was the only time during the year that he could spend unhurried hours with the children.
Helen was now sixteen and had taken on “a young lady look that startles and depresses me,” Hay told Whitelaw Reid. In the fall she would enroll in boarding school at Dobbs Ferry, an hour north of New York, and, like all fathers, he hated to see a daughter he doted on leave the nest. Helen and her younger sister, Alice, would remember their father as an unconditional pushover, sweet-tempered and adoring. “He was so tender-hearted that my mother always had to deal with our youthful injuries, illnesses & discipline,” Alice would reminisce. “He couldn’t bear to see us hurt or made unhappy even for our own good. He spoiled us shamefully.” Helen described him as “the jolliest kind of pal,” who sang “old war time songs & plantation melodies” and made up stories about a pixie “who was as real to us as a member of the family.”
As the two girls matured into young women, their father was ever more indulgent. “The greatest treat we had was to go ‘on a spree,’ ” Helen recalled. “When I was away at school he used to come out & always arranged a programme ahead which began with ‘we will have a nice sandwich for lunch at the Station, we then will go & call on an old lady who wishes to see you & we will finish the day with a delightful & improving lecture on Astronomy’—which of course meant that we lunched at Delmonico’s on whatever I wanted to order, be it ever so indigestible, & shopped & ‘played’ all the afternoon & finished up with a musical comedy.” In the same munificent vein, Hay told Alice, “ ‘If you see a thing you really want, get it, no matter what it costs; because if you don’t, it will haunt you all the rest of your life, & come between you & the later desires of your heart & make them appear less & less desirable by comparison.’ ”
With his son Del he was not so liberal. To a father quick of wit and slight of build, the boy seemed “fat and dull.” Hay complained to Adams that he had bought Del “a carload of fishing tackle, which he will never learn how to use.” When Del’s uncle Samuel Mather suggested that Hay acquire their own launch for Lake Sunapee, Hay thought it a bad idea: “I have no knowledge or capacity that way, and Del is too lazy.” What he did not recognize was just how rapidly Del was growing into his sturdy bones—a physique he inherited more from his mother. By fourteen, he was taller than his father, and his baby fat was already maturing into brawn. His great desire was to play football, the rage among schoolboys and college men but not exactly his father’s game. The most strenuous exercise Hay had undertaken in recent years was to shiver in a duck blind on a raw Lake Erie morning.
HENRY ADAMS HAD NOT seen Lizzie in a year, and now he could not travel fast enough. While he was in the South Pacific, she had written him that she would be in Paris in October, waiting for him. “To think that you are coming, are on your way!” she beckoned. “That I shall see you, shall take you home. I can scarce realize it tho’ I walk on air in consequence.”
From Sydney he replied: “I am grateful as though I were a ten-year-old boy whom you had smiled at, and put in rapture of joy at being noticed.” He was not the least alarmed by her disclosure that she and Hay had been having an “affair.” “The more you please others, the more you delight me. . . . Fascinate John Hay by all means,” he wrote with merry magnanimity. He arrived in Paris on October 10 and sent a note the next day inquiring “at what hour one may convenablement pay one’s respects.”
Lizzie was delighted that a man would come more than ten thousand miles to pledge his affection. Yet once he was at her door on the rue Bassano, off the Champs-Elysées, the currency of romance depreciated to the small change of anticlimax. It was the pursuit that had appealed to her; she had no intention of being captured, nor of capturing Adams. What either of them imagined might unfold in Paris, or after Paris, seems never to have been fully articulated. Once they stood face to face, the gulf between them was immeasurable, their nearness a dream dissolved. She was as blithe as Adams was stunned.
During the two weeks they were both in Paris, she avoided seeing him alone, using her daughter and stepdaughter as convenient foils. “Mrs. Cameron is no good,” Adams finally wrote to a friend. “She has too much to do, and lets everybody make use of her, which pleases no one because of course each person objects to the other persons having rights that deserve respect. As long as she lives it will always be so.” Quoting Elizabeth Browning, he told Lizzie he felt as if he’d been hit over the head with “an apocalyptic Never.”
Just the same, Adams followed her to London, where she tarried briefly on the way to America. On the day of her departure, as her cab rolled away from Half Moon Street, she told him she was sorry that their “Paris experiment” had not worked out. From the ship she wrote, “Thank you a thousand times for everything.”
In reply, he composed a series of lugubrious letters that would follow her to Washington. “[N]o matter how much I may efface myself or how little I may ask,” he confessed, “I must always make more demand on you than you can gratify, and you must always have the consciousness that, whatever I may profess, I want more than I can have. Sooner or later the end of such a situation is estrangement, with more or less disappointment and bitterness. I am not old enough to be a tame cat; you are too old to accept me in any other character.”
Nevertheless, he was willing to be taken back on any terms, if only he knew what they were: “I would give you gladly as many opal and diamond necklaces as Mr. Cameron would let you wear if I could only for once look clear down to the bottom of your mind and understand the whole of it.” Until then, he reconciled, “[Y]ou are Beauty; I am the Beast.”
A few days later, Adams wrote a breezier letter to Hay, recapping his recent activities, including his stay in Paris. “I could find nothing new that pleased me either in art or literature,” he reported, “and as for society nothing of the satisfactory sort was within the bounds of my imagination; but a fortnight or so passes quickly even if nothing is the result.” Of his rendezvous with Lizzie, he mentioned merely that her company served to “beguile my ennui at intervals.” Adams and Hay were confidants in many things, but the particulars of their respective relationships with Lizzie Cameron evidently were not among them.
Adams did not return to Washington until the following February. In the meantime, Hay and Lizzie saw each other often. In late November and early December, while Clara was still in Cleveland, Hay hosted at least two dinner parties at which Lizzie was a guest. After one of them, Lizzie wrote to Adams, reciting the guest list, which included the Blaines, the Roosevelts, and the Lodges. “We all talk to each other and dine with each other just as we have done for two years past,” she said, noting too that Hay was looking much better than when she had last seen him in London. Hay wrote Adams a few days later, remarking that “the women looked extremely pretty in their new gowns. Mrs. Cameron’s Parisian bravery causes all the others to die with envy.”
After the New Year, as the season for balls and diplomatic receptions picked up its pace, Hay seemed never to stray far from the women he admired. At one debutante ball he sat with Nannie Lodge, discussing civil service reform with Charles Bonaparte, the Baltimore-born great-nephew of Napoleon I. “Or at least, I think it was Civil Service—we complimented her eyes,” he joked. He was not so captivated by Nannie that he did not notice Lizzie in a beautiful black satin gown, dancing with the Turkish minister. “Mrs. Cameron is at her best, which is superlative enough,” he reported to Adams. “One never sees her, though, except through a fluttering haze of dagoes and dudes.”
In late January, after another evening during which he had been unable to talk to Lizzie with any satisfaction, he took a walk around the square to gather his thoughts. Returning home, he put pen to paper, pouring out emotions that had been building up since the previous spring. The letter carries no salutation, no signature, and no address—suggesting that it was delivered by hand. “Good night, my tantalizing goddess,” he began. “A dozen times this day I have been at the point of believing that you are not really so complicated as you seem, but that last half hour threw me into the wildest confusion again. I give it up. I will not try to comprehend you. Still less can I criticize you. I shall never know you well enough to do either. After you were gone the usual outcry of admiration broke forth. I said, ‘She has an absolutely different manner in speaking to each man in the room.’ . . . Upon my word I believe if you spoke to a thousand men, you would naturally, by some divine gift of sympathy—or else by some benign science of cruelty—assume to each one of them the form, the eyes, and voice of his ideal. And yet it seems to me that you cannot be to others anything different from what you are to me. A form of perfect grace and majesty, a face radiant with a beauty so gloriously vital that it refreshes and stimulates every heart that comes within its influence; a voice, a laughter so pure and so musical that it carries gladness in every vibration of the air. You sweet comrade, you dear and splendid friend, who is worthy to be your friend and comrade? I am humbled to the ground before you.”
He went on to summon the memory of their time together in England, when he allowed himself to believe he might hold her undivided affection. “What can restore the sweet serenity of that early worship?” he wondered. “My proud goddess, my glorious beauty, my grand, sweet woman, I want to shut my eyes to everything about you here, and adore you as I did at Dulwich, as I did on the terrace by the Thames. Why is it different now? You were surrounded then by adorers bien autrement formidables than the people who obscure you here. Yet I did not mind—any more than a devout person objects to a church being full. Now I feel that your altars are in danger of profanation—the worship itself is threatened.”
In the end, he could only blame himself. “Perhaps the fault is all in me: the resentment may be purely personal, because I have lost the place I have held dear. You know you appointed me No. 3. I can remember the day and the hour, opposite the Knightsbridge Barracks. As nearly as I can now compute I am No. 13—if indeed I am on the list at all. I do not care what my exact number is—I would as soon be 13 as 4—since I have dégringolé [tumbled] from my own place. A true presentiment—which I did not then appreciate—impelled me to worry you to say you would be the same, when we met again. As if promises could avail anything against ‘the strong god Circumstance.’ But I shall never cease to praise and bless you, dear, for what you were, and what you will always be in those sweet memories of Ultramar which I shall carry with me to my dying day.”
Apparently she had given him the same treatment she had given Adams two months earlier—and Hay had responded in a similar fashion. Also like Adams, Hay kept coming back for more. At the end of January, he, Clara, and the Lodges were guests at the Camerons’ new house on St. Helena Island, South Carolina. The three couples evidently got along cordially. “I shall remember the week as a bright spot in my life,” Hay wrote, thanking the senator. As for Lizzie, she seemed to have added another tame cat to her menagerie. Hay basked in whatever attention she would give him, knowing that he would be demoted further when Adams arrived in mid-February.
Once Adams was home, they all behaved fairly well through the rest of the winter and spring. In June, Lizzie and Martha again took up residence in Adams’s house in Beverly Farms—without him. “It is rather funny that your house is the only place I have ever had the home feeling,” she wrote him. “If I didn’t like you so well the sense of obligation would be intolerable.”
They all knew what the rules were. After Hay had bared his soul to her in February, she must have told him not to expose himself in that way again, for that summer, when Adams injured his leg in a riding accident, Hay wrote to Lizzie: “This letter ought not to be charged against me, as I only write to tell you how Mr. Adams is.” After a hasty medical report, he signed off, “Just think! I am closing this letter without a single word of Tra-la-la!” When she scolded Adams for not responding quickly enough to her letters of sympathy—and her offer to care for him during his convalescence—he replied, “The first law of tame cats is that under no circumstances must they run the risk of boring their owners by writing more than once a month or so. You never consider that a tame cat’s business is to lie still and purr.”
Hay, however, would not give up the pursuit. In June, he saw Lizzie briefly at the wedding of Cabot and Nannie Lodge’s daughter in Nahant. A few weeks later, he wrote Adams, “I was sorely tempted to run down to Beverly and see Mrs. Cameron, but I had a list of agenda as long as my arm . . . so I came away without visiting that shrine.” In August, he tried again to tempt the Camerons to buy property on Lake Sunapee, though he admitted the notion might seem far-fetched to the owners of a winter retreat in South Carolina and vast estates in Pennsylvania. “We like the place more and more,” he wrote Lizzie of New Hampshire. “We like the gentle squalor of it, and the incredible idleness. There is absolutely nothing to do from morning till night. I hardly dare to recommend it to princesses and goddesses.”
But he did succeed in persuading the Camerons to accept an invitation to the Fells. For the first time in their lives, they were just four—Hay and Clara, Cameron and Lizzie (plus Martha and the Hay children)—and somehow the two-day stay went smoothly. Lizzie had always gone out of her way to compliment the stout, matronly, and habitually reserved Clara. “Mrs. Hay is looking too stunning,” she had told Adams the previous winter. “She is really superb.” The senator was an agreeable enough fellow when he was not drinking heavily. And while he was not entirely oblivious to his wife’s flirtations with other men, for the most part he too was a tame cat. Once when he had tried to rein her in at a dinner party, she had put him in his place. “I just intimated that he must not make me pay for his jealousies,” she told Adams, “and I must talk to whomever I pleased whenever I pleased.”
Still, Hay must have had supreme mastery of his emotions for neither Cameron nor Clara to suspect his true disposition toward Lizzie. Proper manners went only so far; mere glances, even the avoidance of glances, would have spoken volumes to a spouse who harbored the slightest doubt of a partner’s faithfulness. Their friend Henry James had written entire novels that turned on words unspoken between lovers. But if Clara noticed, she held her peace. If Cameron truly cared, he would have done something about it long before.
After the New Hampshire visit, Lizzie sent a favorable report to Adams. “Our little trip to the hills was a great success,” she wrote. “The Hays were kindness itself, and if Mrs. is a poor hostess for a gathering of dip[lomat]s and notables in Washington, she makes up for it in the country to simple folk like ourselves.” Lizzie loved everything about the Fells. “One can scarcely conceive a wilder spot. . . . That lake is exquisite,” she gushed. She also mentioned, “Mr. Hay looks so well that if he tells you he is dying tomorrow you must believe him even less than usual.”
Hay was equally pleased: “Don was grumpily good natured and la Dona was radiantly lovely. They pretended to like the place and commissioned me to ask the price of farms.” In the end, he wrote Lizzie, offering to lease a portion of his own property—“on reasonable terms, say a nickel a year, and then you would have all your money to squander on your house. . . . You could have free range over the whole place and be everywhere welcome as flowers in May.”
Living on the same square with her in Washington was challenging—and frustrating—enough. How they could ever live side by side in the wilds of New Hampshire was something neither of them could fully imagine. Needless to say, nothing came of their summer fancy.
WHILE HAY WAS SAVORING the peace and quiet of the Fells, national politics had broken into its quadrennial lather. Hay had never particularly taken to President Harrison and would have preferred that his friend and neighbor James Blaine vie for the Republican nomination in 1892. Instead, Blaine resigned as secretary of state and retired from politics. In June, the party, with some ambivalence, renominated Harrison; to Hay’s delight, the delegates replaced incumbent Vice President Levi Morton with Whitelaw Reid. “It is the general judgment that Harrison is a good, safe candidate,” Hay wrote Reid after the Republican Convention, “and you are universally regarded as giving the ticket a great reinforcement.” Later in the summer, Hay presented the Reids with a puppy, bred from a collie brought back from Scotland. Reid named the new family member Harrison.
The election of 1892 was a rematch of four years earlier. This time, however, it was Grover Cleveland who was on the outside, knocking to get in. The McKinley Tariff Act had helped many industries, but working-class Americans believed that it made too many imported goods unaffordable. The Sherman Silver Purchase Act, intended to stabilize the currency, was attacked as a “cowardly makeshift.” Violent strikes at Andrew Carnegie’s steel mills in Pennsylvania; a hoarsening resentment of the wealthy by labor and the mostly agrarian Populists; plus a president who caused “a chattering of teeth among warm-blooded Republicans of the East”—all these factors worked in Cleveland’s favor.
Throughout the campaign, Hay enjoyed sparring with Henry Adams, who was more liberal, more Democratic in voice and principle, though it was beneath him to take an active role in politics at any level. “[Y]ou will be so happy and gay over the nomination of your fellow-mugwump Cleveland that there will be no enduring you,” Hay teased his friend before the Democratic Convention. “Well, go to! be as happy as you please. You can never take away from me the blessed memory of four years of Harrison.” The week before the election, Hay retreated to Winous Point and braced for the bad news. The day after Cleveland’s victory, he sent Adams a dozen ducks and a bitter lament: “Woe is me for my unhappy country, which is to struggle under the double affliction of a stuffed prophet and a stuffed ballot box.” But with Hay and Adams, friendship trumped partisanship no matter what. “I love you in spite of your politics and your dishonest victory,” Hay signed off.
His message of condolence to Whitelaw Reid was not so jocular. “I will not waste words in attempting to expose my deep disgust and grief,” he told him. “At present my chief sorrow is that you and Mrs. Reid are not to be our neighbors in Washington.” And he asked, “Is it not horrible—that fat and fatuous freak, bellowing his inane self-laudations in the White House for four more years, amid the amens of enraptured Mugwumps? The gorge rises at it.”
THE NEW YEAR GOT off to a poor start. On January 27, 1893, James Blaine died of a heart attack; Hay was among his pallbearers. A week later, Hay learned that his mother, who had just reached her ninetieth birthday, was failing. His brother Leonard advised him not to attempt the trip west. For the time being, she was comfortable and well cared for by their sister, Mary. “But you know how it is with old people,” Leonard wrote. “The light grows dim then flickers then goes out suddenly.” She lasted ten more days. When Hay sent word that he could not possibly arrive in time for the funeral, Leonard hastened to console his brother’s regret and sorrow: “[Y]ou must not blame yourself for anything that even the most distorted fancy could picture as a neglect. You have done your whole duty as a son & brother to all of us three & four times over.”
Within a week, Hay was called upon to perform another duty—one that would have a direct bearing on his future. While passing through Buffalo en route to New York to give a Washington’s Birthday speech, William McKinley, who was now governor of Ohio, was handed a telegram informing him that an old friend, Robert Walker, had gone broke in the tin-can manufacturing business—which, incidentally, was an industry protected and nurtured by the McKinley Tariff. A pandemic of insolvency was on the verge of enfeebling America, caused by overzealous expansion, easy credit, and blind optimism. Over the next three years, dozens of railroads, hundreds of banks, and thousands of businesses would fail. One of the earliest to do so was Robert Walker’s in Youngstown, Ohio.
Walker had helped McKinley through law school and his early political campaigns. In gratitude, McKinley had co-signed several bank notes for his friend, and each time that Walker asked him for another signature, McKinley naively assumed that he was signing renewals, when in fact the notes were entirely new. McKinley figured he was accountable for only a few thousand dollars; by the time he received the telegram in Buffalo, the amount exceeded $100,000, more than he could ever hope to reconcile. McKinley, too, would be obliged to declare bankruptcy. Moreover, the embarrassing enormity of his gaffe would surely derail his campaign for reelection as governor in November and snuff any hope he had of running for president in 1896. That is, unless . . .
Immediately a group of McKinley’s most powerful supporters stepped in to make him whole again, led and cajoled by the governor’s chief political booster, strategist, and fund-raiser, Mark Hanna. One of the people Hanna called upon in Cleveland was John Hay’s brother-in-law, Samuel Mather. Mather promised $5,000 to the fund and then wrote Hay, asking if he would help share the load.
Hay needed no prompting. By the time he received Mather’s request, he had already sent McKinley $1,000 directly, unsolicited. He now volunteered to pay $2,000 of Mather’s commitment and mentioned that he might be good for more. Other big industrialists wound up giving as much or more than Hay—Henry Clay Frick $2,000; George Pullman $5,000; Philip Armour $5,000—but Hay’s checks were two of the first, and his touch was more personal, a kindness that McKinley never forgot.
In short order, the money was raised and McKinley was relieved of his debt. Rather than regard McKinley as a scofflaw or beggar or as too inept to manage the affairs of the state, the voters of Ohio expressed resounding sympathy for his plight and in November reelected him by the greatest margin of victory since the Civil War. “I have no words with which to adequately thank you,” McKinley wrote Hay from the governor’s office. “You must interpret my deep sense of obligation and appreciation. How can I ever repay you & other dear friends?” Hay had no immediate answer, but soon enough he would think of something.
THE BIG EXCITEMENT IN the spring of 1893 was not the McKinley debt, the second coming of Grover Cleveland, or even the darkening economic picture, but the World’s Columbian Exposition: the Chicago World’s Fair. Anyone who could afford it, and many who could not, had to see the neoclassical phantasm of the White City that had sprung up, seemingly overnight, on the shore of Lake Michigan. Farmers and small-town shopkeepers who still lived without electricity and heretofore had traveled scarcely farther than the county fair were beguiled by the vast pavilions of inventions, entire villages inhabited by aborigines from every corner of the globe, and a farrago of attractions and confections illuminated by thousands upon thousands of dazzling electric light bulbs. Even cosmopolitan visitors were impressed. Adams, who arrived in May in a private railcar paid for by the Camerons, was overwhelmed by the fair’s immensity and pleasantly surprised by its beauty—“something that the Greeks might have delighted to see, and Venice would have envied.” The Hays went in June and were similarly smitten. “[I]n architectural beauty . . . it so far transcended anything which the genius and the devotion of man have ever yet achieved,” Hay exclaimed to Richard Watson Gilder.
On June 27, a week after the Hays returned from Chicago, the New York Stock Exchange crashed, and America suddenly appeared as flimsy as the facades of the White City. By the time the collapse came, Hay had already purchased passage to Europe for his family, with the intention of staying for a year—except for Del, who in the fall would enroll in the Westminster School in Dobbs Ferry to prepare for Yale.
All of Lafayette Square was abroad that summer, or so it seemed. Adams had sailed a few weeks earlier with the Camerons, the widowed Harriet Blaine, and her children. Another of Adams’s fellow passengers was Thomas Bayard, President Cleveland’s ambassador to the Court of St. James’s—the first time the rank of ambassador was assigned to an American foreign minister. The Hays reached London on July 20 and spent two days with Adams before he headed to Scotland. By then the Camerons had already left for Switzerland.
As the news from America became more dreary, Adams and Cameron both cut their trips short and returned home. “Everyone is in a blue fit of terror,” Adams wrote Lizzie after he was back in Washington, “and each individual thinks himself more ruined than his neighbor.” The only one of their group who seemed not outwardly affected was Hay. Adams wrote Lizzie that their friend was “calm as the Lake of Lucerne.”
For the next eleven months, the Hays lived a life of leisure and luxury, visiting their good friends Sir John and Lady Clark in Scotland and soaking up the sun and the baths in the South of France. They passed much of the fall in Paris, followed by a month-long sojourn in Spain. Hay read of the American economic and political news from afar, clucking at the missteps and misfeasance of the Cleveland administration in letters to Adams and Reid. For the most part, though, he was content being idle and aloof. Writing to Adams from Paris on New Year’s Day, 1894, he groused amiably: “I am bored out of my sweet life.” To those back home, some of whom were barely hanging on, this sort of grumbling might have sounded a bit like bragging.
ADAMS, BLESSEDLY, WAS NOT hurt by the panic as badly as he initially feared. The same could not be said for Clarence King. Even in the best of times, King had made a botch of business. “Every struggle he makes in his world of finance gets him deeper in the mire [and] costs him something of life as well as of money,” Hay had remarked to Adams several years earlier. And to William Dean Howells he had sighed: “A touch of Avarice would have made [King] a Vanderbilt—a touch of plodding industry would have made him anything he chose.” When King was flush, he dashed about Europe, eating and entertaining like a lord and buying art and curiosities with abandon. Hay would eventually compose an ode to King’s acquisitiveness, entitled “A Dream of Bric-À-Brac.” But he and Adams, while admiring King’s exquisite taste, could only shake their heads at his profligacy. When the author and taste-setter John Ruskin sold King two paintings by J.M.W. Turner, King was said to have laughed, “One good Turner deserves another.” Now the paintings, along with a bundle of unredeemable stock certificates in far-flung mines, were pledged to Hay, who, along with Adams, continued to loan money to King with no intention of ever foreclosing, regardless of how much he admired the Turners or how delinquent King was in making good. “He owes nobody except those who will never bother him,” Hay told Adams. “I am in despair about him. I cannot make him do what he ought, even though I offer to stand the racket.”
The most painful pinch caused by King’s indebtedness was his increasing reluctance to be in their company. “[W]henever I think of you and the splendid work you are carrying through with such solemnity of purpose and conscientiousness of effort,” King told Adams, “I feel that you must regard me with despair and be amazed at the barrenness of my poor life. . . . With all the sense of disappointment and the anger at fate there has grown up a sense of shyness about being much with the only friends I care for—you and Hay. . . . But you must be patient with me, and remember the millstone I wear ’round my neck.”
King of course had another reason for his shyness, and other undisclosed millstones. In July 1893, three weeks after the stock market crash, his wife, Ada, had given birth to their fourth child. At about that time, King also received word that the National Bank of El Paso, which he had founded and in which he was a principal stockholder, had failed. He lost everything, and yet he was too proud to tell Hay or Adams—and he certainly couldn’t tell Ada, who still believed he was a railroad porter. Over the next three months, King fell apart. He let his hair and beard grow shaggy, and his clothes became seedy. On Sunday, October 29, visitors to the Lion House in Central Park noticed a man acting agitated, enraged. When police intervened, he gave his name, Clarence King, and his address, first the Union League Club and then Newport, where his mother lived. No mention of the street where he lived with Ada and their children.
Arrested for disorderly conduct, King was committed to the Bloomingdale Asylum for the Insane in Harlem Heights. The diagnosis was nervous depression, brought on by his recent financial setback and aggravated by an inflammation of the spine. Dr. S. Weir Mitchell was summoned from Philadelphia, but, rather than prescribe his customary Rest Cure of fresh air and a rural setting, he recommended that King stay on at Bloomingdale, where he remained for the next two months, without telling a soul about his bipolar life, and presumably without telling his wife of his whereabouts.
Adams kept Hay informed of King’s recovery, and Hay was consoled to learn that the two were planning a trip to the West Indies after King’s release, anticipated for early January 1894. Yet Hay was frustrated that he had heard nothing from King directly. “It would seem incredible to anyone but you,” Hay complained to Adams from Paris, that “King has not written me a letter for a year and has never given me the least hint of his affairs except that they were desperate. I have sent him money and securities sufficient, I hoped, to clear him, but have never been informed that he received them, much less what he made of them. I am as much worried over him as if he were my child, but I do not know what to do to help him, in face of his obstinate silence.” In a subsequent letter, he urged Adams to “jolly” King up in the West Indies and then bring him to Washington. “Now that his affairs have gone to everlasting smash we can set him up in a bijou of a house.” Hay had no idea how implausible this proposition would sound to King, aka James Todd.
KING WAS NOT THE only friend to fall by the wayside that winter. After New Year’s, Hay, Clara, and Helen made their way to Italy, leaving Alice and Clarence in the care of a tutor outside Paris. They were in Rome at the end of the month when Hay read in a newspaper of the death of Constance Woolson in Venice.
For all her popularity as a short story writer and then as a novelist, Woolson had led a solitary life. One of the few people with whom she gained a modicum of closeness was Henry James. She was an ardent admirer of James’s work and had come to Europe to meet him and, to the best of her ability, emulate his Continental lifestyle. She had tracked him down in Florence while James was beginning The Portrait of a Lady, and he kindly introduced her to the Renaissance city and its stirring architecture, galleries, and statuary. Thenceforth they were loyal friends and correspondents. James described her to an aunt as “old-maidish” and “intense,” but she was grateful for his artistic kinship and clearly would have welcomed something more. While he gently criticized her prose for its preoccupation with “tender sentiment,” she encouraged him to create a female character “who can feel a real love.” Her wish was never fulfilled. In the fall of 1893, she was living in Venice when her “deadly enemy,” depression, took hold. In January 1894, she came down with influenza and perhaps typhoid, and in the early morning of the twenty-fourth she leapt (or fell, as her family chose to believe) to her death from her window to the cobblestones below. She was fifty-three years old.
Because Woolson was a relative of Samuel Mather, the Hays felt a special responsibility to help with her funeral and burial. When Hay read of the tragedy in the paper, he telegrammed the American legation in Venice and offered to pay all expenses for shipment of Woolson’s body to Rome, where she would be buried in the Protestant Cemetery, according to her wishes.
In the meantime, he and the rector of St. Paul’s, the American church in Rome, went to the cemetery and found a spot near the graves of Shelley and Keats. “She is worthy company for the best and brightest that sleep around here,” Hay wrote Mather. “Her grave will be a shrine for the intelligence of the world for many years to come.” To Adams, who understood suicide better than most, Hay confided, “We buried poor Constance Woolson . . . a thoroughly good and most unhappy woman with a great talent bedevilled by disordered nerves. She did much good and no harm in her life, and had not as much happiness as a convict.”
Henry James, who was in England when he learned of Woolson’s death, was stricken with remorse. “Miss Woolson was so valued and close a friend of mine and had been so for so many years,” he wrote Hay in Rome, “that I feel an intense nearness in participation in every circumstance of her tragic end.” Even so, he elected not to make the long journey to the funeral.
HAY, CLARA, AND HELEN stayed on in Rome until early spring, then began working their way north, first to Florence and next to Venice, where they visited the house that Constance Woolson had rented near the Grand Canal. From there they proceeded to Vienna, Dresden, Berlin, and finally arrived in Paris at the beginning of April to retrieve fourteen-year-old Alice and nine-year-old Clarence, who by now were speaking passable French.
They started for London on May 2 to be in time for Helen’s “first great day of grandeur”—her presentation to Queen Victoria. Writing to Whitelaw Reid, Hay tried to make light of the occasion. “My womankind have just driven off to the Buckingham Palace in gowns whose vastness and splendor abashed me,” he complained lamely. “H[elen] thought she would like to be presented and Mrs. H[ay] and I, who for 20 years have avoided that function, weakly yielded and are swept into the vortex.”
Perhaps he had forgotten Clara’s great disappointment at having missed her first drawing room in 1883 due to her father’s worsening health. Hay, too, rarely passed up a chance to make the acquaintance of great and better Britons. A week after Helen’s presentation, he dressed “like an ape of Borneo”—in knee breeches and stockings—and himself bowed to the queen.
As much as he tried to downplay the London season, this was his favorite time of year in a country he had come to regard as almost a second home. He and Clara made another pilgrimage to the Clarks in Scotland, then returned to London for a dizzying round of engagements. They attended a ball at Buckingham Palace. Hay was invited to a dinner at the House of Commons with the prime minister’s son, Herbert Gladstone, the historian and Scottish secretary George Trevelyan, and Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies Sydney Buxton. At a dinner party at Trevelyan’s house, he spent an hour talking to the new foreign secretary, Lord Kimberley. And he and Clara had cards for the Royal Enclosure at Ascot—“the goal of every true Briton’s ambition,” he wrote Samuel Mather.
By the time they sailed for home at the end of June, Hay was well sated. “I never could have believed that a succession of what used to be pleasures, balls, concerts, shows, and dinner parties could become such a weariness to the flesh,” he sighed, but it was clear that he had relished every minute of his latest English immersion. “They are a dear and simple folk, in some ways—these English,” he observed cheerily to Adams.
HE COULD NOT HAVE been too worn out by the London carousel, for within a week of getting home he agreed to take a much more grueling journey: this one to Yellowstone National Park with Adams, who suggested that they take Del along, too. Del had excelled in his last year in school and had passed the entrance exams for Yale. He was now six feet tall and a beefy two hundred pounds. A summer riding and camping would harden him for football in the fall. Adams also asked King to join the trip—the ideal companion for such an adventure—but he would not commit. Instead, they were accompanied by Hay’s friend William Phillips—“Bilfilips,” Hay called him—who was an early advocate for the preservation of Yellowstone and, along with Theodore Roosevelt, a founder of the Boone & Crockett Club. The final member of the party was Joseph Iddings, a geologist who knew King and, like Phillips, had spent a number of seasons in Yellowstone.
Initially, they worried that they might not make it past Chicago. While Hay was in Europe, the economic panic had stirred extreme disaffection among the nation’s working class. Earlier in the spring, Jacob Coxey, an eccentric rabble-rouser from Massillon, Ohio, had led an “army” of several hundred unemployed men on a cross-country march to Washington, where they intended to present a list of demands to Congress. Before he could deliver his ultimatum, Coxey was arrested for walking on the grass of the Capitol. Ten days later, a different, more volatile sort of army took to the field: three thousand workers at the Pullman Palace Car Company in Illinois went on strike over low wages and demeaning labor conditions. By the end of June, fifty thousand members of the American Railroad Union, led by Eugene Debs, had walked off the job. Angry strikers stopped trains and destroyed rolling stock, switches, and railyards, until U.S. Attorney General Richard Olney obtained an injunction authorizing federal troops under General Nelson Miles (who happened to be married to Lizzie Cameron’s sister) to impose order. Debs was taken to jail, and by the time Adams and his companions set out for the West on July 17, most of the strikers had returned to work. Ten days earlier, and the Yellowstone expedition might have had to follow a more roundabout route.
They arrived a week later at Mammoth Hot Springs, the north entrance to the park. Yellowstone had been founded in 1872, but until the completion of the Northern Pacific Railroad in 1880, few tourists had ready access to its 2 million acres of geysers, waterfalls, and wilderness. By 1894, though, the route was well traveled. Hotels, tent camps, and coaches allowed visitors to make a grand tour of “Wonderland,” as the railroad brochures advertised, providing plenty of spectacle and just enough hardship to make the trip a true adventure.
For the first week, they took in the sights by coach. To Hay’s cosmopolitan eye, nature imitated art, not the other way around. The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone compared favorably with Thomas Moran’s inspirational painting of the same scene, which he had first viewed in the Capitol. He also recognized paintings of the park by his old friend Albert Bierstadt. A waterfall was as high as the Washington Monument; an enormous rock, when seen in the right light, was a Sphinx; and a certain spring was twice as big as Rome’s Trevi Fountain.
For a man who purported to have a weak heart and rheumatism, Hay thrived unexpectedly in Yellowstone. An unheated salon in Paris gave him sniffles, but an accidental dunking in frigid Yellowstone Lake seemed only to refresh him. Much of Yellowstone Park is more than eight thousand feet above sea level; yet Hay tramped up hills for better views and slept under frosty skies without complaint.
After touring the park’s Grand Canyon, falls, and lake, the party truly began to rough it. For the next month, they rode horseback through the rugged, densely timbered backcountry, nearly to the Grand Tetons. Led by five guides and packers and pulling a pack string of a dozen horses, they covered more than two hundred miles of “absolutely trackless woods and plains and mountains,” Hay boasted to Flora Mather. “We lived like fighting cocks.”
No one was more impressed by Hay’s grit than Adams, who up until then had seen his friend stroll barely more than a few city blocks. “Hay has become a blooming mountaineer,” Adams wrote Lizzie. “I am quite proud of having dragged [him] through this extravagant mountain nonsense just to show that he can do that sort of thing as well as anyone. . . . As an invalid with constitutional heart-failure, he [is] an abject fraud. I hope he will never try again that bunco-game on us. If he does, whack him up a mountain!”
In his letters to Clara, Hay fairly exulted in his stamina and spirit: “We had a long ride—the route being unknown to any of us & there being no distinct trails. . . . We got off our horses & began our scramble down the mountainside; slipping in the ashy dust, sinking in the boggy grass, sliding and slipping over great fields of snow, we at last got to the bottom. . . . We are living altogether too well.” He fretted that his appetite was so great that he was losing his “sylph-like proportions.” On one of the few layover days, he lounged about camp, reading a biography of Cicero and drinking in the glorious view of the Tetons, which, he attested, “are nearly as tall as Mont Blanc.”
Del, too, seemed to blossom under the rigors of the trail. He hunted elk with the guides, shot grouse, and learned to fly-fish. “Del was a favorite in the camp . . . very good-natured, bright-tempered, cheery and companionable,” Adams reported to one of his nieces, although, “according to his father, [he] will never be fit for doing anything in life.”
AFTER FINISHING OUT THE summer in New Hampshire, followed by a month in Cleveland and at the duck club, Hay at last returned to Washington in late November. He had not been in Lafayette Square in sixteen months and had not laid eyes on Lizzie Cameron since early in 1893. In the fall of that year, he had written to her after her mother’s death: “It is a savage irony of nature that all that charm of yours which brightens every scene you enter, which is a joy to every heart and every eye you come near, is now in this moment of need, of no use to your self. If you could call in one tithe of the happiness you have radiated on others, you would have a reserve sufficient for any use. . . . Love and sympathy mean nothing in real [times of] trouble, but still I must send my love and sympathy.”
Sadly for Hay, Lizzie did not call upon him in her time of need. Yet whatever were the circumstances that kept them apart—their unsynchronous trips to Europe, her sojourns to South Carolina, his to the Fells and Yellowstone, and, what seems more decisive, her gentle but firm request that he not pursue her so intently—he did not stop pining for her company. Though she discouraged him from writing love letters, he found release in verse. In 1893, he published “Love and Music” in Harper’s Monthly:
I gazed upon my love while music smote
The soft night air into glad harmony. . . .
Her form, white-robed, the jewel at her throat,
Her glimmering hands, her dusky, perfumed hair,
Her low, clear brow, her deep, proud, dreaming eyes,
Bent kindly upon me, her worshiper
There is no record of whether Hay showed this particular poem to Lizzie before he published it, but he sent other poems to her directly, for she later mentioned that “I had a pretty collection of Hay’s verses, but he one day asked me for them to revise, and then destroyed them! The only one preserved was the sonnet to me which he published in his last volume of verses.”
The sonnet in question is most likely “Obedience,” which provides a frank assessment of Hay’s ongoing enchantment with Lizzie and the authority she continued to hold over him:
The lady of my love bids me not to love her.
I can but bow obedient to her will;
And so, henceforth, I love her not; but still
I love the lustrous hair that glitters over
Her proud young head; I love the smiles that hover
About her mouth; the lights and shades that fill
Her star-bright eyes; the low, rich tones that thrill
Like thrush-songs gurgling from a vernal cover.
I love the fluttering dimples in her cheek;
Her cheek I love, its soft and tender bloom;
I love her sweet lips and the words they speak,
Words wise or witty, full of joy or doom.
I love her shoes, her gloves, her dainty dress;
And all they clasp, and cling to, and caress.
That Lizzie was indeed the object of “Obedience” is corroborated by a letter Hay wrote her at about the same time, in which he worships her with comparable anatomic specificity: “Never was a body and spirit united on such equal terms. Your mind and character are extraordinary; but not more so than your hair and eyes, your arms, your waist and your dear little feet. How they trot through my dreams, asleep and awake.”
From then on, however, Hay became, if not exactly a tame cat, then at least one who kept his distance. He and Lizzie were both in Washington for the Christmas holidays, but not long after the first of the year, she was off to South Carolina for the winter. And so the coals were banked, though hardly extinguished—not so far as Hay was concerned.